Returned to base

I have departed the fair and toasty land of Kenya and returned to the Emerald Isle for "a while".

All is running fantastically over in Malindi, so it's a good time to return and see how all is on this side.
Jim, Amosh and Zahura (secretary) are working really well together, which is great to see, and they are building the centre into a great project which is reaching many people in the community. I will be in weekly contact with them via email, and any photos of the continuing work will be posted here for all to see. Also give me a few days to find things and I'll post a load of photos of all the work in Kenya.

Also during the last month in Malindi, Derek, a volunteer from Dublin came over to work through our centre and the Love SHACK in Nairobi. He is well trained and versed in HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention and on sexual health, and moved around the community running short training programs and also learning new things himself.
Through the centre Derek managed to get in contact with a lot of community groups known to us, and then also used our facilities to run some of his discussions. He has given us his training materials and these have been added to our database for all to view and use.

Bryan came over during my last 2 weeks in Kenya, bringing more computer goodies and ideas. With his document management experience we have got the whole system running very well now, and with a new very powerful computer that he brought we can run high level software that we previously weren't able to load (e.g. GIS).

With Bryan, after the first Lindsay Africa Project Safari Tour, we visited all the schools with computers which PCs for Africa have supplied, that are far off the "good" tarmac road. We spent 2 days off-road driving up mountains to schools perched upon high, some running computers on solar power. Some of the schools are doing really well, but unfortunately some are not. This is mainly due to funding, but also due to lack of any good computer technicians working in the area, that also can be trusted not to run off with the equipment, this problem is really hindering the overall project because in every school you end up with lots of broken computers, no one to fix them and thus unavailability of the machines to the students.
Unfortunately my own computer skills are not that great, so I could only help with what I could on the day, and time was also against us.

There is always a place for more work to be done unfortunately, but it's time to be at base for a while.

Thank you so much for all the support, funds for the projects and also kind and loving words.

It's going to be great finding everyone again and telling the tales in person.


Lindsay